How To Manage Academic Program Costs Without Compromising Your Mission

When significant financial changes are necessary, an institution must look beyond administrative costs to its core academic enterprise. While academic programs are the heart of the university's mission, a strategic review is often essential to ensure long-term financial sustainability. This process is not about arbitrarily cutting programs, but about making data-informed decisions to align resources with student demand, instructional efficiency, and institutional priorities.

HelioCampus recognizes the sensitivity of these decisions. Our Academic Cost Analytics provides a framework for these discussions, grounding them in objective data. The following strategies are designed to be used thoughtfully, often in combination and after administrative cost-saving measures have been fully explored, to help leadership make the difficult choices necessary to secure the institution's future. We have outlined below the primary actions your institution can take to strategically evaluate the academic portfolio, powered by the data in the HelioCampus models.

1. Establish and Enforce Policies on Teaching Loads and Course Relief

Your institution can ensure equitable and efficient use of faculty resources by setting and enforcing clear policies around teaching loads and course relief. By analyzing instructional data, you can establish a minimum teaching load and create a consistent process for granting course releases and understanding exceptions related to research or administrative duties. This ensures instructional capacity is maximized and deployed in alignment with institutional priorities.

2. Streamline Course Offerings and Optimize Class Sizes

Your institution can achieve significant efficiency gains by aligning course offerings directly with student demand. Having access to term-by-term data on course fill rates and enrollment trends simplifies the review process, allowing you to quickly consolidate or reduce under-enrolled sections and strategically increase class sizes where pedagogically appropriate. This ensures instructional resources are not wasted on low-demand courses and are instead focused on student needs.

3. Evaluate the Instructional Mix for Greater Efficiency

Your institution can optimize its instructional budget by evaluating the mix of instructor types (e.g., tenured faculty, adjuncts, graduate assistants) across the curriculum. This analysis provides a clear picture of who is teaching which courses and at what cost, allowing you to make strategic decisions about instructional assignments. With the addition of Labor Cost Analytics, you can also compare this mix to similarly structured external benchmarks, providing valuable context for staffing decisions. This ensures a cost-effective balance that aligns with both financial goals and academic quality.

4. Explore Strategic Restructuring of Academic Units

To achieve long-term financial health, your institution can explore opportunities for consolidating colleges, schools, or departments. By analyzing margins per credit hour and comparing administrative structures to peer institutions, through Labor Cost Analytics, you can identify where academic units could be combined to reduce administrative overhead, foster interdisciplinary collaboration, and create more financially sustainable academic structures.

5. Evaluate the Program Portfolio for Potential Consolidation or Sunsetting

HelioCampus recognizes that conversations about program viability are among the most difficult an institution can have, and are often the least popular to discuss. However, to ensure long-term institutional health, a strategic and data-informed review of the entire academic portfolio is essential. By analyzing program-level financial margins and enrollment trends, leadership can objectively identify high-cost, low-demand programs that may be candidates for being combined with stronger programs or strategically sunsetted. This challenging but necessary process allows the institution to responsibly steward its resources, reinvesting them into areas of growth and strategic priority.

From Strategy to Action

Each of these strategies offers a pathway to improving the financial health of the academic portfolio. Should your institution have a defined reduction target or strategic realignment goal, HelioCampus is prepared to partner with you. Upon prioritization of these strategic approaches, we will deliver scenario-based analyses that model potential financial impacts and identify the most promising areas of focus to help you achieve your institutional goals.

For more information on the benefits of an approach like this, what data you need, why it's hard, and change management approaches, watch this recorded webinar.